How Accurate are Public Tracks in Distance? Buying Wheel Necessary?

Your watch is not a reliable indicator when running around a track, forget whatever numbers you see on it. A regular track is almost certainly accurate, you shouldn't worry at all

I think this guy is serious. God bless you. Glad you made it this far. I’ll pray for you.

Even if it’s off by a whole meter(it’s not), that’s still only a quarter of a percent. The inaccuracies due to you self timing with a wrist watch are much more significant. Furthermore, rolling into workout reps, swinging wide into lane two to go around other runners, and unintentionally stepping on the inside line all impact the precision of your workout much more than imagined erroneous track. If you are seriously this concerned, you should solely go by time for reps in workouts, and completely ignore distance or paces indicated by an imprecise GPS watch.
8/10

I know a watch isn't totally accurate. So delete that paragraph and my question still stands if that's the part that is throwing you off.

It also feels just a tad long. My splits are usually another 1-2 seconds longer. Another subjective measure. But if a track that pros are running record attempts can be off, why the confidence in something a city has made for people to mostly walk around on?

A) It depends on whether it's a certified competition track or a random park loop.

B) Note that certified competition tracks are measured in meters, not imperial.

C) A certified competition track is going to be static and more accurate than your GPS watch 100% of the time.

runtrack.run sometimes has information about the tracks in your area. It's known that the track nearest my house is actually 390-395m so I run in Lane 2

Thanks, it's not certified, which is why I was asking. It has all the appropriate markings, but is otherwise just a random track made by the city that mostly has walkers on it and surrounds a soccer field.

There is no way it's 10m short unless you had a severely inexperienced fly by night contractor do the install.

That seems highly possible. It's a middle school track after all

So tell me how training 2 seconds per lap faster affects your 23 minute 5k race

Yeah because a road race is the same as a track...

But sure measure track and install a curb before each workout. And make sure you have a FAT system. If a workout isn't record eligible, you clearly will not get any benefit from it...

Though you know having wavelight to help with the pacing would be nice🤣

Who cares if a track is a few feet longer or shorter than standard? No workout has to be precise down to the foot. Even track events that aren't world class can be a little off as long as everyone is racingvthe same distance.

The idea would be for a time trial. I agree that for a workout it's not a big deal.

The Stanford and BU tracks are short and need to be measured.

Because I want to break 23 someday, and training at the right paces will help me go from 23:04 to 22:59.

... every year they are. Coaches come out with a wheel and find out EVERY YEAR.

You think?

Aight...I thought it might be possible given how sloppy a lot of construction projects are in my very large metro city. It seems like the consensus here though is that there is virtually zero chance it's off by more than a meter. In that case I got my answer!

There are plenty of non-standard tracks around. Heck, I know of two of them (less than 350m around) within a mile of each other:

34.136171, -118.030726

34.124458, -118.030409